Garry Wills seems to have emerged – Venus-like – almost fully formed from William F. Buckley’s skull. A beneficiary of Buckley’s impulsiveness and generosity, Wills was, according to Buckley, “National Review’s first major discovery.” As a seminarian, Wills had been forbidden to write articles for secular journals. He had written them anyway and held on to the drafts, sending out four unsolicited pitches to different magazines when he quit the seminary. One, a skewering of the written and intellectual style of Time magazine, had appealed greatly to the editors at National Review, among whom were two former Time/Life men. Buckley later wrote in a letter he “was so pleased on reading it that I called him up and asked him to visit us, expecting to find an old man. He was then 22.” After a day in New York that Wills vividly recounts in his memoir, Buckley offered Wills a job, and essentially a new life.
Except that Wills was not fully formed at all. Having spent his last five years in seminary, Wills’s politics were not strictly determined. Uncomfortable with free market economics, he considered himself a Distributist (which Buckley had been informed did not make him a conservative). Over a decade, the fault lines that were arguably there from the start, became cavernous, and the lessons Wills took from his greatest teachers – St. Augustine, Chesterton, Newman, and above all Natalie Cavallo – moved him inexorably away from the conservative movement, but maybe toward another, more authentic conservatism. In conservative movement histories, especially by those within the movement itself, Wills is often called an apostate (which hints at the religious-like fervor of the conservative movement at times). The first and greatest apostate, alongside some impressive names like John Leonard, Arlene Croce, and Joan Didion. This I think takes the idea of Wills converting (or falling away) too much for granted, and doesn’t reckon with Wills persistent engagement with the ideas of his conservative movement mentors and with the concept of conservatism. I prefer to think of Wills as a conscience for the conservative movement. Or perhaps a prophet within the conservative tradition.
Nevertheless, in 1957, Wills was a Catholic, and retained the strong anti-Communist beliefs of 1950s America and 1950s American Catholicism especially. His talent and his Catholicism were enough for to be going on with in the early conservative movement. And within it he took a crash course with the big figures of early conservatism. Buckley pushed Wills to write on theater, politics, Catholicism, and review, review, review. At the time, Wills was pursuing a doctorate in Classics. His scholarship focused on Greek theater and poetry. He didn’t just drop Latin and Greek phrases. He read the languages.
Despite – or really because of – his age, Wills impressed many of the old hands around NR. Willmoore Kendall, for instance, whom Wills named as his most important teacher of politics, called him “simply a genius” in a letter to his sister. Kendall marvelled at Wills’s talent at what was to him more or less “a side-interest.” Wills and his wife, Natalie, became very close friends with Frank and Elsie Meyer. Under their tutelage, Wills read classic political theory and thought deeply about where his own politics lay. Buckley, too, considered Wills a genius (which was rare and high praise from him). Buckley came to rely upon Wills in his intra-Catholic debates. With his seminary training, Buckley reasoned, Wills must be an expert in theology, ecclesiology, Church history and so on. This assumption led Wills to do the work, deepening his own expertise, and leading to a position as the conservative columnist in the National Catholic Reporter. In addition to his academic work, Wills began a habit of writing books in the summer. In short order, Wills was married with children, and had both a burgeoning intellectual reputation, status within the conservative movement, and a developing academic career (PhD, Yale, 1961), holding a position at Johns Hopkins University. He had deep personal relationships, too, with the conservative intellectual firmament. He even signed on to be Buckley’s official biographer.
(Not everyone was so impressed by Wills. The modernist aesthete Hugh Kenner found Wills in his arch-Catholic period fusty, especially after Wills pseudonymously criticized Kenner’s positive review of Samuel Becket’s The Unnameable. Wills had an “Irish fixation” with “‘healthy’ art,” Kenner complained – representative of wider conservative narrow-mindedness regarding art. Still sore two years later, Kenner said Wills had a tendency to substitute “Chestertonian tone for perception.” (Even after another year, Kenner was still complaining about the review.))
Coming from the Catholic tradition that understood families to be the basis of society and markets to be merely a tool, Wills was never confident about the conservative movement’s libertarianism or celebration of free enterprise. In the early 1960s, this manifested in his challenging of Frank Meyer, and his vehement opposition to Ayn Rand. “Allowing any connection to be established in anyone’s mind, between National Review and Ayn Rand is a betrayal of National Review’s stance and your record,” he wrote to Buckley. In his later reflections on conservatism, Wills wrote, "It was easy from the outset to see that libertarians lived in a dream world of hypothetical atoms interacting with each other dynamically, not chemically. No society can ever be formed on the basis of individualism, togetherness deriving from apartness.”
So, as a Catholic and something of a communitarian, in the intra-conservative debates of the era, Wills sided with what is often called the traditionalists, although Wills referred to them as the authoritarians. They were authoritarian in the sense that they were searching for an authoritative basis on which to base society, which was to them the fundamental flaw of liberalism and modernity. For Kendall, this meant the authority of the deliberating people; for Bozell, Holy Mother Church; and for Kirk, the Burkean tradition. Although Wills, like his closest friends and mentors Kendall and Meyer, had no brief for Russell Kirk, whom he considered a shallow nostalgist.
Politically speaking, as a traditionalist as with most issues at National Review, Wills was a squish. His fullest articulation of his political vision at that stage was “The Convenient State,” an essay for Meyer’s collection of essays called What Is Conservatism? In it, Wills argued on Augustinian grounds against both liberal rationalism and conservative authoritarianism for a politics of lowered horizons. “For the Christian, the state can no longer fill up man's failings or aim at self-sufficiency and ideal justice. The earthly order must be identified as temporal, an area of trial and transition.” Even as Wills relationship with other conservatives was collapsing, Meyer admitted his view “represents a valid position within the conservative spectrum.” Throughout his career at National Review, Wills had been a moderating influence (except on anti-Communism) – on capitalism, on Vatican II. And especially on the issue of race. Buckley biographer John Judis argues Wills temporarily won Buckley over to limited affirmative action on the grounds that recognize both just and unjust continuities in society. While taking summer work at the Richmond Times-Dispatch under the respectable segregationist James Jackson Kilpatrick, Wills wrote an editorial (ultimately killed, but not by Kilpatrick) criticizing the scientific racist Carleton Putnam.
While still, more or less, in good standing at National Review, Wills’s most famous work confronting race was a long, pained essay on James Baldwin, titled “What Color is God?” Sometimes described as a positive review of Baldwin and The Fire Next Time, it’s truer to say Wills took Baldwin seriously. Jeffrey Hart later described the long essay as opaque. In reality it reflects Wills struggle to grapple with Baldwin and with America’s racist history of injustice toward Black people. “He is an intimidating adversary,” Wills wrote to Buckley. “I tried to nerve myself to the job by reading all his five books, and the few scattered stories I could find, but of course that had just the opposite of the effect I intended.” In the end, Wills recognized Baldwin’s searing indictment and cri de cœur, but responded in defense of both Christian brotherhood as an answer to racial injustice and of Western Civilization. Nevertheless, he concluded Baldwin “deserves an answer; he deserves a fight. He is an adversary worth our best arguments, and one of the uses of the fight is that it may force us to remember what our best arguments are. Once we do that, we have won; and so has he.”
Publication of “What Color Is God” had been challenging. Book reviews editor Frank Meyer opposed it. It probably got over the line because of Wills’s closeness to Buckley, but also perhaps as an apology for a tetchy misunderstanding between the two. Buckley raided Wills’s essay before it had been published for his own syndicated column attacking Baldwin, without crediting Wills (and distorting Wills point and Baldwin’s quotes). Wills threatened to publish the piece elsewhere, noted he suspected he was “‘soft’” on the Negro issue, by NR's standards,” and complained about Buckley’s efforts to make Baldwin look ridiculous. Kendall thought the review “bar-none” one of “the two best pieces ever printed in NR.” Others never looked at Wills the same way.
As 1960s wore on the moral and intellectual framework of the conservative movement looked as exhausted as its political prospects post-Goldwater. The political crises of the era, culminating in 1968 wore on Wills. He became frustrated with the strictures of movement conservative, which he came to see as right-wing, but not necessarily conservative. But also grew beyond the genre confines of fortnightly opinion journalism. He wrote longer reported pieces as a participant in the New Journalism – some even for National Review, although not without controversy. And as his conscience became persistently pricked by events of the late 1960s, that in 1970 he sought a syndicated column to respond faster to events than journalism allowed. He wrote to tell Buckley he wouldn’t like what he wrote.
Wills’s long goodbye with National Review and movement conservatism began in 1965, when Wills wrote sympathetically about the pacifist priests, the Berrigan brothers and in doing so severed conservatives’ sacred link between Catholicism and anti-Communism. In fact, Wills came to see the conservative movement of the 1950s and early 1960s as based on a hysterical and crusading anti-Communism. Wills had participated enthusiastically in it; but in the throes of the Vietnam War and later détente, what meaning could it really have? Did it ever have?
From a New Journalism perspective, Wills wrote – allegedly sympathetically – about Black militants and the long-haired protestors and the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In his column, he opposed the Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, Moynihan and others. Wills later suggested the turmoil of the late 1960s was the body politic exhaling the anti-Communist fever of the earlier decades, which draws his thesis too far.
At National Review, Wills’s apostasy was met with disbelief, disappointment, and in some cases of professional jealousy, glee. Jeffrey Hart, an editor at National Review and a mean-spirited critic of Wills, implied the newly radical Wills embraced militants and kids on snobbish aesthetic grounds. In 1970, his old friend Meyer said in print he was “a sucker for the spirit and élan of revolutionary movements, black or white,” complained about Wills’s “scorn for the free-enterprise system,” but also, like Hart, imputed a basic snobbishness to Wills. Underpinning all his writing “is an attitude he shares with the whole of the New Left: utter contempt for Middle America, its values, its virtues, its instinctive grasp of what the United States and the West have always stood for. Middle America is the last heir of Western civilization. In rejecting it Garry Wills rejects what has made his country and his civilization great.”
One perceptive letter writer responded to Meyer asking, “can we honestly say that Middle America shares – or even comprehends – the passion of a Whittaker Chambers in search of a spiritual rather than material solution to the crisis of modern society? Shall we really maintain that Middle America scorns the materialistic life? Only the insensible and unperceptive could maintain that. Even the devotion of Middle America to the freedom and liberty championed so robustly by Frank Meyer often has a selfish and materialistic ring to it.”
The drawn-out fracture pained both sides. Meyer’s hit on Wills was, Buckley wrote, “sorrowfully but dutifully” done to “one of our oldest friends and finest writers.” For his part, Wills wrote privately to Buckley that he had “not wanted to quarrel with National Review. I would never have sought out an occasion for quarrel” and had not taken up opportunities to fight. “I wanted to keep ties, out of old debts and friendships, and hope of mutual instruction,” which is why he continued to submit articles that were being killed. “My personal respect for you continues undiminished, and for that reason I must tell you I think the magazine’s standards of veracity and honor are scandalously low.” Specifically, Wills had in mind Meyer’s review of Nixon Agonistes, Wills’s tour de force critical analysis of the 1968 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon, but also the liberal – free market economics, free market of ideas – tradition in America. Meyer had not done the professional courtesy of actually reading Nixon Agonistes before reviewing it, Wills alleged. He identified a “savage strain” emergent at NR in people like Hart. “This strain seems to color the editorial section of the magazine, a fact I regret for many reasons – one being that it is so unlike you, who remain my personal model of all that is civilized, considerate, and charitable.”
During a taxi ride with Buckley’s sister Priscilla, National Review’s managing editor, Wills reportedly told her the magazine was “making it easy for him to go radical.” Yet he admitted he was very glad he could still talk to some people at NR. Priscilla sought to set up a dinner to maintain the connection between NR and Wills.
Wills and Buckley labored to maintain cordial relations. Buckley hosted Wills on Firing Line in 1973. In practice, their relationship became more and more acrimonious: the surrogate father figure; the rebellious son. Buckley lost other protégés to events or personal disagreements. By all accounts none stung more than Wills. Their final break came the following year when in the midst Watergate, Howard Hunt became a newsworthy figure. Hunt had been Buckley’s boss during his short stint in the CIA. Wills made an apophatic reference in his column to National Review being a CIA psy-op. After all, Buckley, his sister Priscilla, Burnham and Kendall had all been in the Agency or its forebears. The CIA connection was even a rumor within NR. Wills avers he relied on publicly available information. Buckley may have thought he broke confidences from Wills’s erstwhile stint as his biographer. In any case, they didn’t see each other again for thirty years.
In spite of the aching relations in his political and intellectual life and his political opposition to the Right, Wills retained an affection for the label conservative. Wrongly assumed to be a conservative in his youth, Wills adopted the term in his maturity. Even in 2024, having shed nearly every identity through critical reflection, Wills remarks, “I’m still conservative by temperament.”
In his strange, slim memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, Wills vividly sketches his time at NR, but largely gives the book over to a slow-motion apologia for his conservatism. Part of Wills’s problem – and the problem of American conservatism – is semantic (something I partially place blame for at the feet of Kirk). Writing against Ayn Rand in 1960, Wills claimed “The simple equation of capitalism with conservatism is not only naïve, but fatal.” He developed this idea nineteen years later in Confessions. In Europe, the term “conservative” makes sense – because of the variegated entrenched interests in the structures of power. Think, for example, the established churches, the landed aristocracy, the industrial leaders, the urban elite, and so on. Without a feudal past, the United States lacked these power structures. We have only the business interest (I wonder, perhaps, whether we could or should talk about racial hierarchies here).
Why call it conservative, then? “We rather simple-mindedly kept the nexus power=conservative, even when the power involved was a revolutionary and unstable one. And with equal originality we called ‘liberal’ any challenge to the business world's power—even unions, promoting stability and cutting down the ruthless bargaining of a ‘free market.’”
And yet, despite these semantic errors, his bruising history with National Review, and the ways his political education had circumscribed him, “the instinct toward conservatism remains.” So he landed in a place of, to him, much more authentic conservatism: a perspective that values coherence, continuity and community. Buckley’s biographer John Judis suggests Wills recovered something of the moderate conservatism of the New Conservatives, who predated Buckleyite conservatism by several years. I initially thought the same: Wills’s reference to unions as promoting stability in the ruthless free market reminded me strongly of something Peter Viereck repeated.
But I think the connection to the New Conservatives is insufficient. Wills’s conservatism is both more theologically rich and more Christian. Instead of a rediscovery of the New Conservatism, I think what Wills actually does – not necessarily intentionally – is find a way to rescue the thought of one of his mentors, Willmoore Kendall. The New Conservative project took the theological concept of Original Sin as its starting point, and argues in favor of moderating institutions, constitutional protections, and social ballast. They endorsed the post-war New Deal order basically because they thought it good in a world riven by totalitarianism. Wills (and Kendall) would find this insufficient. Wills is a much more skeptical thinker and chronicler, but at the same time he finds a way for Christian love to – not redeem – but make room for justice in society, which was what Kendall could not do.
In Nixon Agonistes and Confessions of a Conservative, Wills collapses the liberal understanding of the American political system. (Wills’s former friends called him a radical, not a liberal.) In Wills’s view, which was primarily based on reportorial observation though reinforced with political science analysis, the democratic process is a rational choice between reasoned options, selected by a majority. Each of these components breaks down. There is no rational choice made in elections; the policy options are rarely presented, and the candidates are always winnowed beforehand; and the candidates elected or policies endorsed rarely actually reflect an authentic majority, just some lowest common denominator. Rather, it is elites who essentially decide (through complex, varied, and competing processes). Elections primarily ratify the decisions after the fact. The people rely not on statesmen but on those most mediocre of elites – politicians, whose role is to compromise, negotiate, middle through, and in a sense, represent.
Yet strikingly, Wills professes to appreciate this system in all its frailness because he values continuity and, because of a certain eschatological agnosticism about the ultimate fate of each individual person derived from St. Augustine, settles for less in the political realm. He settles for less because the secular realm is not the realm of ultimate justice, and cannot be. This analysis of the ramshackle consensus generating political system and the Augustinian appreciation of it is, I think, deeply Kendallian. It is, more or less, where Kendall left off and he was rightly accused of accepting impediments to justice.
But Wills cannot look away from injustice, because he is a Christian, because he broke free from conservative cloisters, because he lived through The Second Civil War, not the Spanish one, and, he avers, because he listened to his wife. And so alongside Wills’s fairly bleak analysis of the American political order, he identifies and celebrates a second tradition hovering above the conventional one of statesmen and men on bills and coins. Wills reveres prophets, the spiritual geniuses who identify and challenge injustice. Such prophets are often sacrificial lambs, whose witness and frequent martyrdom overcomes the often willful blindness of society. Wills treats the prophets and the prophetic tradition as a way – something less than a mechanism, and a bloody way, but a way nonetheless – of overcoming the Kendallian insistence on social consensus that so often reinforces injustice. Wills, I think, adds a layer of (often secularized) Christian martyrdom on to Kendallesque analysis he still finds compelling.
Once he has established his understanding of the American order, Wills tells us what he wants in a society: cohesion, community, peace, shared affections, albeit with low horizons.
Because it values continuity, any sane conservatism cannot be opposed to change. Cohesion and stability are not insured but doomed by mere brittle resistance to inevitable change. The constant adjustings and compromisings, pushings and shovings, takings and givings, settlements and half measures that are ridiculed in our politics are the signs of life reacting as a whole; making society responsive to a number of needs, so we can move and change together.
Wills suggests his is a living, breathing conservatism – acceptable neither to liberals, who misunderstand America, and the Right, which “is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of ‘conserving’ and an actual order it does not want to conserve.” Instead, from National Review to Claremont to the American Reformer and on and on ad nauseam, the Right “keeps trying to create something new it might think worthy, someday, of conserving.”
I can’t help but think Wills’s analysis of the American political system, written in the late 1970s, came just at the tail-end of America’s middling through. Can the system he describes work in an era of political (including party) polarization? Or where the Right in particular is beholden to a certain righteous apocalypticism? Wills’s critiques often hold up; but I am less confident that the convenient state offers a vigorous enough defense of the system Wills endorsed in spite of itself. Then again, perhaps we will just middle through.
A post-script. Priscilla Buckley retained Wills’s friendship, and “trusted to the real regard Bill and I still had for each other.” In 2005, she insisted Wills and her brother have dinner at the old NR haunt. Their friendship resumed, and “It was clear that our old disagreements had been transcended.”
I had forgotten that Willis was so deeply part of the NR orbit. He left the magazine around the time I started reading it and the things I've seen of his were outside my interest area. But seeing him as an apostate from the right makes me see him as a kindred spirit. I wonder how many others have passed through the NR universe at one time or another?